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CCR Sectional Narratives 2006: Permafrost Changes

The current distribution and future projections of permafrost are examined in a fully coupled global climate model, the Community Climate System Model, version 3 (CCSM3) with explicit treatment of frozen soil processes. The spatial extent of simulated present-day permafrost in CCSM3 agrees well with observational estimates - an area, excluding ice sheets, of 10.5 million km2. By 2100, as little as 1.0 million km2 of near surface permafrost remains. Freshwater discharge to the Arctic Ocean rises by 28% over the same period, largely due to increases in precipitation that outpace increases in evaporation, with about 15% of the rise directly attributable to melting ground ice. Such large changes in permafrost may provoke feedbacks such as activation of the soil carbon pool and a northward expansion of shrubs and forests. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. (Lawrence and Slater, 2005)

Figure 21. (High resolution image)Warming signal strength by ocean and depth. Ensemble mean permafrost area and active layer thickness as simulated in CCSM3 at the end of the (a) 20th and (b) 21st centuries. (c) Observational estimates of permafrost (continuous, discontinuous, sporadic, and isolated). (d) Time series of simulated global permafrost area (excluding glacial Greenland and Antarctica). The gray shaded area represents the ensemble spread.